Killer Ratings: A Susan Kaplan Mystery Read online

  Perhaps the detectives sensed some of this, because Detective Lu’s expression softened and his voice seemed gentler.

  “Is there a private room where you can give a more detailed statement to Detective Wagner?”

  It took me a second to get my brain into gear.

  “An office?” I asked. “Maybe Charles Green’s office?”

  Even though I’m sure neither of the two detectives had any idea who Charles Green was, Detective Lu nodded encouragingly.

  “Why don’t you lead the way?”

  I got up from my chair and crossed the bullpen, heading for the corridor that led to Charles’s office. Detective Wagner followed me, and as I passed into the corridor I heard Detective Lu say, “Sherman O’Dell? Is there somewhere you and I can talk in private as well?”

  Charles’s office was locked, but I was still clutching my key chain and I used the master key to open the door and step inside. I turned to Detective Wagner, not sure what I needed to do next. He nodded to Charles’s black leather couch, and I sat while he pulled over one of the desk chairs and sat down himself.

  I kept my legs together, hands folded politely in my lap, overly conscious of my posture and trying hard to sit up straight. The room was stuffy and Wagner shrugged off his jacket, dropping it onto the chair next to him. His black T-shirt revealed weightlifter’s muscles. I stared at the puckered patch of skin in the shape of a crescent on his upper right arm. A scar from a knife fight? Bullet wound? Birth defect? I slid my eyes back to Wagner’s face, uncomfortably aware of staring at his arm longer than was polite.

  But Wagner didn’t seem to notice. Not once had he cracked a smile or looked at me with anything remotely resembling warmth. When he pulled out a notebook and pen and looked me in the eye, I felt overwhelmed with guilt. Even though I had nothing to do with Rebecca’s death, I believed myself to be in some way responsible. And I was convinced Wagner thought so, too.

  “Why don’t you tell me how you found her?” he asked, not taking his eyes off mine.

  I had already explained everything to the uniformed officers who had arrived first, but I didn’t have the nerve to tell that to the detective. So, with another brief glance at his scar, I said, “I came into work early. I wanted to read some scripts that I knew were in Rebecca’s office. I went to unlock the door, but it was already open.”

  I stopped. Wagner looked at me expectantly. I felt I had to be specific.

  “I don’t mean it was open open, I just mean the door was already unlocked.”

  “Is that unusual?” he asked.

  “Normally I’m the last one to leave. So I usually lock up the office for her. But last night she told me to go home early. She was still in her office when I left.”

  “What happened after you found her? Did you examine the body? Touch anything beside the doorknob?”

  “No. I took maybe two steps into the room. I kind of knew what happened. I mean, I sort of figured she was dead.”

  Could I sound any more like a blithering idiot if I tried? My stomach cramped. Oh please God, don’t make me sick now. I had the Weiss stomach, inherited from my mother through my grandfather. It would go sour on me at the most inappropriate moments. Like now. I crossed my legs, wondering if the detective would let me get the roll of Tums out of my bag in my desk.

  “And then you ran and got …” Wagner checked his notebook. “Mr. O’Dell.”

  I nodded. Wagner’s continued silence, his expressionless stare, was, I knew, a ploy to keep me talking. I obliged.

  “I knew what I saw,” I said. “But part of me was hoping I didn’t … You know what I mean?”

  Wagner continued to stare at me. My eyes slid back to his scar. It was a startling white-grey against his dark skin. My stomach cramped again, and I could feel beads of cold sweat forming at my hairline. I felt guilty as hell, and I knew Wagner was already picturing me on death row. Suddenly, having a vivid imagination didn’t seem like such a great thing after all.

  He turned back to his notebook. “Do you normally come in to work at …” He looked back up from his notebook. ‘What time did you say you came in?”

  There it was … The question I had dreaded all morning. I came in early because I hated my boss so much I had to see if she was ruining not only my career but everyone else’s who wanted a shot at writing a Babbitt & Brooks script.

  Faintly, I said, “Eight o’clock.” My stomach bubbled with gas. Maybe I had an ulcer.

  “And normally you arrive at …?”

  “Nine-thirty.”

  My stomach cramped again. This’ll make a great story for the grandkids, I thought. If I ever live to have grandkids. “Why’d you come in an hour and a half early then?” I bolted upright from the couch. “Excuse me,” I said, and I could hear the panic in my voice. “I really have to go to the bathroom.”

  Without giving him time to stop me, I ran out of Charles’s office, hitting the ladies’ room in five seconds flat.

  2.

  I washed my hands and blotted my face with a paper towel. My face in the speckled mirror looked pale beneath the blush I wore—The Plumberry Collection for winter complexions. I had no idea what a winter complexion was; all I knew was that I didn’t want to leave the bathroom and face that detective again. I didn’t want to have to explain to him why I came in early, how much I hated Rebecca, but, no, not enough to kill her. My stomach still felt queasy and I was terrified of having to run back into the stall. Wouldn’t Wagner view that as a sign of guilt?

  When I left the bathroom, he was sitting at one of the cafeteria-style tables that lined the basketball court. Great. He probably heard me in the bathroom. This was definitely not the sexy detective scenario I had constructed for myself. I made my way toward the table, sliding onto the bench opposite him.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “I am now,” I lied. I tried not to look at his scar, but did anyway.

  “Why do you keep staring at my arm?” he asked.

  Oh great. Caught in the act. “I just wondered what that scar was on your arm.” Might as well be honest.

  Surprisingly, he made a face. It was the first human expression I had seen from him since we met.

  “Stupid,” he said. “Fraternity initiation. We all got tattooed. Six years later I realized how dumb it was. Had it removed.”

  “Oh,” I said, taken aback by his honesty. Maybe he wasn’t such a bad guy after all.

  “When is everyone else expected in today?” he asked, all business. The real Mike Wagner, lurking under the mask of “Detective” was gone as quickly as it had appeared.

  I looked at my watch. Could it only be nine in the morning?

  “In about thirty minutes or so,” I said.

  “How many people work here?”

  “Lots,” I said. “It’s a television production company.” I added with a note of pride, “We’re filming the show Babbitt & Brooks.”

  Wagner looked like he didn’t recognize the name. I shouldn’t have been surprised. In spite of the high praise from critics and women’s groups, the male demographic sucked.

  “You actually film here?” he asked.

  I nodded. “But the cast and crew are on location today. Yesterday, too.”

  “So who was here yesterday? And who do you expect today?”

  “Ray Goldfarb, the showrunner slash executive producer. Sandy Martin, his assistant. Charles Green, supervising producer. Jennifer Bardos, his assistant. Peggy Stevens and Zack North, writer-producers. And I’m their assistant.”

  “Anyone else?”

  I paused, remembering Winifred McCauley’s visit last night. I also remembered how much Winifred seemed to dislike Rebecca.

  Suddenly, I felt completely out of my depth. Could one of these people have killed Rebecca?

  “Susan.” Wagner brought me back to the present. I noticed he called me by my first name. Was it to put me at ease, like my gynecologist back home on Long Island tried to do, when I was lying naked on the examinatio
n table, feet in the stirrups, legs spread? Somehow, I felt just as exposed, fully dressed, sitting across the scarred Formica table, staring at this Tshirted detective with the tattoo removed from his right arm.

  “Rebecca received two death threats,” I blurted out.

  Wagner’s brown eyes narrowed, his gold Cross pen paused over his notebook.

  “Explain,” he commanded.

  And so I did.

  I told him everything, even about Rebecca initially blaming me. I looked away as I told him that, convinced he’d suspect me of her murder as well, but fearing worse consequences if I said nothing and he learned of the accusation from Jennifer or Sandy instead. He kept his eyes steady on me throughout, only occasionally glancing down to jot a note or turn a page in his notebook.

  “I never returned the first threat to her,” I said in conclusion. “And she never asked about it. She was kind of quiet yesterday.” Because she didn’t get the promotion? Was that something I needed to tell Wagner?

  Without looking up from his notebook, Wagner asked, “Do you still have those letters?”

  “The one I found should still be in my desk. Sandy Martin took the other note to her office. She may have thrown it out.”

  “Let’s take a look.”

  We walked down the writers’ hallway to the bullpen. I opened the lower right hand drawer of my desk and removed the folder in which I had kept the letter. It was gone. I stared blankly at the empty file as if waiting for the note to magically reappear.

  “Are you positive that’s where you put it?” Wagner asked.

  “I thought I did. But maybe in my rush to put it away, I misfiled it.” I looked through my other files. Nothing. Then I searched the rest of my desk. The note had vanished. I looked at Wagner helplessly, feeling my face flush, convinced he thought I was making the whole thing up. “Maybe Sandy held on to the other one,” I said, hoping that would appease him.

  We headed toward Sandy’s office around the corner, passing Rebecca’s on the way. I tried not to stare into the open door, but I couldn’t help catching a glimpse of the body-bagged figure as the coroner’s attendants strapped it to a gurney. I felt shocked—and scared. Wagner placed a hand on my shoulder and steered me away. I shook off the feeling of doom and entered Sandy’s office—and stopped in surprise. It looked like a hurricane had hit—or maybe an earthquake that only jolted this particular room. Papers were everywhere, in disorganized heaps not only on her desk, but on top of file cabinets, even on the floor. Sandy was not known for her neatness—but she did have an uncanny ability to find a particular memo or contract in a particular pile. I had been in her office the night before to place some phone messages for her on her desk. Although her office was not neat then, it definitely had not looked like this. Wagner, of course, noticed my surprise. I told him what was wrong.

  “Can you tell if anything is missing?” he asked.

  I surveyed the room once again, this time more carefully. Sandy’s computer still sat on her desk, but I had no idea where to look for the death threat. Which is what I told Wagner.

  “Then we’ll just have to wait until Ms. Martin comes in,” he said.

  “Do you know why anyone in this office would want to send Ms. Saunders death threats?” he asked as we walked back to the table in the basketball court.

  I shook my head, not because I didn’t know, but because I couldn’t believe this was happening. Everything felt so unreal. Was Rebecca really dead? Had she actually received two death threats? Had I hidden one away? A philosophy professor in college once asked the class if we really knew the difference between sleeping and waking. He suggested that maybe when we thought we were dreaming we were actually awake. And when we thought we were awake, we were really dreaming. At that moment, I wanted to believe him. I wanted to believe I was asleep and dreaming.

  “You know of no one who would send her those notes?” Wagner asked again as we slid across from each other on the cafeteria benches. I pulled myself out of my reverie. If I was actually awake, I had better start dealing with it.

  “Rebecca wasn’t well-liked in the office,” I said. “But is one of my coworkers capable of sending her threats? Of killing her?” I shook my head again. “These people are my friends. She could’ve antagonized a crew member. An actor. I wouldn’t know.”

  I hoped that answer satisfied him. I didn’t want to accuse people without justification. “Okay,” said Wagner, and I could see him shifting gears. “When did everyone leave last night? Do you know?”

  I nodded, relieved at the change in subject. “Charles Green left to go to the set,” I said. “That was about five o’clock. Then Jennifer left about ten minutes later. Sandy Martin had a dentist appointment. She left around five-thirty. Peggy Stevens left soon after, followed by Zack North. Ray Goldfarb’s wife picked him up.”

  “And what time did they leave?” Wagner asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “They were still in Ray’s office when Rebecca sent me home.”

  “Is that usual? You mentioned earlier that you normally leave after her.”

  Once again I forced myself not to look at Wagner’s scar. Why did I want to stare at it as a way of avoiding difficult questions? Why couldn’t he put on his jacket and put me out of my misery?

  “My work was finished for the day. I think Rebecca was about to leave soon after me.”

  “But she didn’t.”

  I shook my head. “I guess she didn’t.”

  Then I paused, staring at Wagner as I just remembered something. “Rebecca’s car isn’t in the parking lot,” I told him.

  “Are you sure?”

  “She has her own space. All the staff does. The lot was empty when I drove in this morning.”

  “Which is her space?”

  “Right in front of the building. It has her name on it. You can’t miss it.”

  “And where does she keep her purse? And her car keys?”

  “Her keys are in her bag,” I said, pleased that I remembered this from the day she drove me to lunch. “And she keeps her bag in her lower right hand desk drawer.” Wagner nodded and rose. “Stay right here. And don’t talk to anyone.” He crossed the huge, empty room, disappearing down the corridor back to Rebecca’s office.

  Who in the world was I going to talk to? No one was in. And where had that other detective taken Sherman? I remembered my stomach. The cramps and queasiness had passed, maybe because the murder had suddenly become less personal. If whoever killed Rebecca stole her purse and car, then perhaps this was just a robbery gone wrong, or some crazy person who wandered into the unlocked building last night and found Rebecca alone and vulnerable. Maybe the death threats were practical jokes, not to be taken seriously, just something someone wrote to rattle Rebecca.

  That would’ve made me feel better except for the disappearance of the note in my desk. And the building should’ve been locked. I knew whose fault it was if it hadn’t been. Not, I decided, that I was going to say anything to Wagner. Nevertheless, I was more than a little nervous when he returned a few minutes later.

  “We can’t find her keys or her purse,” he said. “However, we did find this.”

  With the tips of his fingers, he carefully removed a script from a paper bag and placed it in front of me. Spots of dried blood sprinkled the top of the title page. Dress Blue, I had typed neatly about a quarter of the way down the page. Then, two spaces underneath, “A Stitch in Time,” the title I had chosen for my story. “Written by Susan Kaplan” four spaces below that. Scrawled diagonally across the page in blazing red ink in Rebecca’s bold, sprawling hand, were the words, “Let’s get a real writer in on this.”

  I sucked in my breath sharply. The knife in my gut reappeared, twisting deeper, and I was distressingly aware of Wagner looming above me. “Is that the victim’s handwriting?” he asked.

  The victim. Did he choose those words deliberately to remind me of what exactly had happened to her? If he had, it was unnecessary. I nodded and spoke so quietly Wagn
er had to lean in closer to hear. “Yes, she wrote this.”

  “Did you see this before her death?”

  I wasn’t too shocked to realize that Wagner was gently trying to get me to admit I had—and it was that which had set me off and caused me to kill her. But I could only admit the truth.

  “No. I didn’t know about this. Until now.”

  I kept staring at those words, repeating the phrase over and over in my head, knowing I would never forget them. I hate you. Rebecca. I hate you. I’ll make you eat your words. I will. To my utter embarrassment, a tear slid down my cheek and splattered onto the script.

  Perhaps Wagner took that single tear as a sign of remorse. He sat down next to me and asked in a gentle voice that invited confession, “Are you sure about that?”

  How could I tell him that even in death that woman had the power to wound me? How could I tell him that I was still hurt and angry by her actions, that her death wasn’t enough for me to forgive her? But I had to try because, underneath my shock and hurt, there was a part of me that knew Wagner thought of me as a suspect. Her words on my script had been my motivation to kill her.

  I looked him straight in the eye, mentally giving him permission to probe my psyche and discover my innocence.

  “Charles Green read my script,” I told him. “He liked it and gave it to Ray Goldfarb.” Wagner stared at me, his brown eyes warm and compassionate, ready to be the best listener I ever had in my life. The guilty deserved no less. “But Ray gives everything to Rebecca.” I faltered, looked away. “I saw the script on Rebecca’s desk. But that was before she wrote … this.” Spitting the word out, not even able to look at the red-inked phrase. “Rebecca wasn’t going to like it no matter what—I knew that. An assistant couldn’t be a better writer than she was, couldn’t be a better anything. Especially her assistant.” Especially me.

  Wagner didn’t say anything, and I forged wearily ahead, knowing I was talking too much, but needing to tell my side of the story.